Migration Case Study

The Army Benevolent Fund, formerly ABF The Soldiers’ Charity, is the Army’s national charity, supporting soldiers, veterans and their families for life. Since 1944, the charity has been at the forefront of support for the Army family. It is one of the largest funders in the sector, reaching 65,000 people and funding over 66 charities and organisations in 2021. The charity supports the Army family through life’s challenges – whether that involves bereavement, injury, getting back to work, elderly care, and much more. Last year, its beneficiaries ranged from a seven-month-old baby to a 103-year-old veteran.

The challenge

The Army Benevolent Fund engaged with Rebura as they wanted to focus on improving the scalability, resiliency and redundancy of the charity’s existing WordPress website. The website was running on a single EC2 instance which meant it had intermittent performance issues. Therefore, Rebura needed to work quickly to create the new platform.

The solution

Rebura deployed a new infrastructure to allow the Army Benevolent Fund to host their WordPress site on AWS, following the best practices of AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The new site’s platform was built using an EC2 instance in a private subnet behind a load balancer. The database of choice was Aurora MySQL serverless for seamless scalability and performance. For enhanced security, the website files were stored in an EFS volume in a private subnet. The website will use a CloudFront distribution, which will serve static files from an encrypted S3 Bucket and dynamic files from the EC2 instance.

This whole architecture was deployed using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) to allow easy deployment and also to maintain and manage the architecture easily once handed over to the Army Benevolent Fund.

It was created in parallel to the existing site under a new subdomain, then switched over once the configuration was completed.

The website upgrade focused on the following elements as part of the charity’s requirements:

• Improve their application’s existing resilience and redundancy
• Provide a platform to allow for future development

The results

The infrastructure build was completed quickly and efficiently, with minimum disruption. The Army Benevolent Fund now has a scalable, optimised, and futureproof solution.  The website platform will provide an enhanced customer experience and add extra security and flexibility for any future changes.